Court backs detainees' Gitmo trials

July 16, 2005|By David Stout, the New York Times

WASHINGTON -- In a significant victory for the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policy, a federal appeals court ruled Friday that military commissions could resume war-crimes trials of detainees at the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously for the administration and against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, who is facing terrorism charges.

The panel overturned a decision Nov. 8 by a federal district judge in Washington, James Robertson, who had ruled that, in setting up military commissions to try the detainees, President Bush overstepped his constitutional authority and improperly brushed aside Geneva Conventions provisions on the handling prisoners of war.

"The president found that Hamdan was not a prisoner of war under the Convention," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the panel in Friday's ruling. "Nothing in the regulations, and nothing Hamdan argues, suggests that the president is not a `competent authority' for these purposes."

Lawyers for Hamdan, a Yemeni in his mid-30s who has denied he is a terrorist, can now appeal to the full Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, or they can seek to appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. But for the moment, the Bush administration's policies and approach have been validated.

Robertson had held that the commissions could not go on because they violated international law and did not provide minimally fair procedures. His conclusion threw into doubt the legal proceedings devised by the administration to deal with hundreds of suspected terrorists captured by the United States in Afghanistan during the military campaign that toppled the Taliban after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

President Bush has declared all Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to be unlawful enemy combatants and as such not entitled to be treated as legitimate prisoners of war.

Critics of the administration have argued that the military-commission trials do not afford all the legal protections that courts-martial do. But in the appeal upheld Friday, the administration argued that the commission trials were fair -- and not incidentally a vital part of its war on terrorism -- and that because the stateless al-Qaeda terror network had never signed the Geneva Conventions, its members were not entitled to the protections afforded prisoners of war, which include the right not to be put on trial for hostilities.

Administration lawyers had argued that Robertson, in conferring Geneva Conventions protections on Hamdan and by extension others like him, had "put terrorism on the same legal footing as legitimate methods of waging war."

Those "legitimate methods," as described in the agreement, include wearing uniforms to distinguish fighters from civilians and prohibitions against making civilians targets. The administration argued that al-Qaeda fighters had openly defied the provisions.